Como
}} Como is an Austrian pop singer. Career As a child learned the piano and sang Como Schlager front of an audience. With the onset of puberty she refused but continued to occur. Instead, they only wrote for himself as a sort of musical diary replacement. As a neighbor of one of their songs heard and nachspielte, the law graduate decided her songs with a copyright lawyer to deposit. This advised her to contact a producer and they finally came up with the manager Klaus Bartelmuss in connection, which is also among others Andreas Gabalier and Nik P. looked after. Her stage name comes from an unspecified relationship with the Italian Lago di Como, her real name keeps the singer secret. Together with producer Mathias Roska presented Como in 2013 their debut album Music Diary completed. With the first single Suitcase she had a moderate success in their home and reached number 19 of the Austrian charts in July. Como was twice the Austrian Amadeus Award nominated: once as an interpreter in the category "Pop" and secondly with the song Suitcase in category "Song of the Year". Biography - "Como's Music Diary" Diary – refuge, oasis for the soul, collecting basin for thoughts and memories of experiences we want to preserve. Diaries are patient listeners and often your only confidant. That’s how it is with diaries, and that’s how it is with Como’s diary. Como? „Just Como. That’s my nickname“ says the young Austrian – and: “Yes, it has something to do with this wonderful city in Italy. It’s so incredibly quiet and beautiful there, Lago di Como is definitely my place of self-discovery”. But there’s also this never frankly uttered speculation that her own life once started in this Lombard city… and her smile simply puts a stop to all further inconvenient questions. Como lives in Steiermark. Born in Graz, raised in the western part of the country, home of the white Lipizzan horses. Mining industry, glass art, nature – and hardly an hour’s drive to Italy. A three-women household in Bärnbach: Grandmother, mother, daughter and a tomcat, “although he didn’t stand the womanly dominated idyll for long. After one year he threw himself in front of a car – in the hardly trafficked 20 mph zone – it was just no life for a macho”, Como says with a smirk, “and for me, too, the small town became smaller and smaller. Single mothers are often a bit clingy, and I virtually had two of them.” With only 16 years of age, the young Como moves to the regional capital Graz, and into her first own apartment. After finishing school she attends university: English, French, Italian, law, politics, economics. The young woman with the characteristic curly hair strictly creates and follows her path. It is her wish to change the world, to become an advocate of Greenpeace or an activist in politics to look after what really matters: taking care of our world. In doing so, her most important companion since childhood has always been her diary. Como’s diary has black and white keys. Music has always been a part of Como’s life. Grandpa was a composer, and as his granddaughter had inherited his musicality, great expectations had been placed on her. She was only four years old when she first stood on stage; in music school she felt rather constricted than creatively challenged. “Finally, at the age of 13, I refused to make music in front of other people”, she says. After that, she fled with her music into creative isolation. Songs originated at the piano, mostly late at night, when everybody else was asleep. Thoughts and experiences that needed to be dealt with became lyrical fragments which over all the years finally led to the creation of Como’s “Music Diary”. She says she doesn’t exactly write songs – they just happen. “I sit down at the piano and play whatever comes to my mind. This leads to a rough draft that still has to mature, until all of a sudden the gaps practically fill themselves” says Como, who till the present day has always kept her songs to herself as well-hidden entries in her diary. “None of my songs has ever been supposed to be published”, she says, her music had been her hard kept secret, “a hidden part of myself that I did not want to share with anybody”. But quality always finds its path, and sometimes it meanders miraculously through time and space. “One day I heard my neighbour play one of my songs on his guitar. He must have listened to me and my piano late at night, and when I heard my song through the wall, I suddenly panicked. I had always been careful to keep my songs to myself, and now one of them had escaped through the wall, and out of my life!” Como recorded her songs in demo-quality on a CD and deposited it at a copyright lawyer’s office. “Not because I presumed that my neighbour had bad intentions, on the contrary: I suppose it was rather meant as a kind of compliment – but you never know who else is listening”, she says. The lawyer wrote down a telephone number for her and jotted down the name of a producer and recording studio owner, Andi Fabianek, next to it. “A professional”, he said, “go and play this to him”. Como took the CD and went to see Fabianek: “I only have rudimental piano skills, I’ve never enjoyed professional vocal training, I'm unable to read notes and I have never seen the inside of a recording studio. Apparently, I was one of many who handed him a demo CD, because he gave me a piece of his mind at the start by lecturing me on how hard the music business truly was. But unlike the others, I told him I actually didn’t want to go on stage. I just wanted to know whether my music was apt to bear up under a professional”, she remembers. The rest is history – and it entered her life with a crash. “He encouraged me to play my songs to others to see how I could touch them and he helped me to take one step after the other.” Her studies had been on the home stretch and she had planned to continue with diplomat academy to prepare a future career within the European Union. But for now, Brussels has to wait in line, for Como’s diary has assumed an independent existence – this time not through the wall. From Graz it travelled on to Teufenbach, the residence of the music manager Klaus Bartelmuss, who took her under his wing. “Klaus has enabled me to realize my ideas together with absolute professionals like Mathias Roska at the Mitte Studios in Berlin. That was an entire new world for me, I think only few musicians get such a chance”. Actually, the way things look right now, Brussels has to wait for much longer. “Music Diary”: The first album is an excerpt of her complete diary. However, she still keeps many songs for herself, “they are simply too far-reaching, too personal”, she says. So far, Como’s songs have flourished in obscurity, they don’t have a long history of numerous live appearances, they have not been tested in vivo. Just like the artist, the songwriter Como herself, who only created this music just to be her own outlet. Maybe that’s just the reason why it is so pleasant to listen to these practically virgin songs. But it is also music that needs to be discovered by the listener. Voice, lyrics and compositions – this is no fast-food but rather soul, personality and expression. It is Como’s diary to which she grants outsider access, for the first time. Discography Albums * Music Diary (2013) Singles